Emmanuelle Sharon
Commander Emmanuelle Sharon is a former soldier in the Systems Alliance Navy, who later became the head of security for NairidaCorp. She is best known as the Commanding Officer of the SSV Belgrade from 2181 CE until its destruction in 2187 CE. History Early Life Born in the Segonia township on Mindoir in 2154 CE, the future commander had a childhood that is a subject of debate; in public, she has spoken fondly of growing up on a collective farm, surrounded by relatives and neighbors, but Segonia has a reputation among conspiracy theorists for the experiments that supposedly took place there. Whatever the truth, her childhood ended abruptly in 2170 CE, when batarian raiders hit several human colonies, including Cailloux, in an attempt to drive the humans out of the Terminus Systems. Emmanuelle lost her entire family and her home, and she herself was captured and taken to a batarian space station, where she was subjected to The Box, a very small coffin-like box to which she was confined for two months. The Box The exact nature of The Box is one of the Batarian Hegemony's most jealously guarded secrets, and so exactly what Emmanuelle endured for those two months is unknown (Emmanuelle's later recollections of her time in The Box, obtained under hypnosis, were inconsistant), but she has suffered constant nightmares and night terrors ever since. Eventually, her screaming and pleading caused one of her torturers, Grivak Tarks, to begin having nightmares of his own. A former doctor who'd been forced into torture duty for disobeying his superiors, Tarks was already miserable after weeks of watching his peers torture victims for no reason. When he was assigned to personally adjust the settings on Emmanuelle's Box (and thus became directly responsible for her suffering), he became extremely depressed, until finally, in a suicidal fit, he decided to send a message to the Alliance informing them of the station's whereabouts. During the ensuing Alliance raid, Emmanuelle was freed and taken back to a hospital on Cailloux for treatment. Emmanuelle hated living at the hospital, and tried to run away on more than one occasion. Initially, the doctors feared that she had developed Stockholm syndrome, but one of the Alliance military administration staff, Pamela Nilsson, managed to get through to Emmanuelle and discovered that she'd developed strategies of her own to deal with what she had experienced and resented having a regime of treatment forced on her. Though Nilsson was not formally trained as a counselor, her superiors authorized her to begin one-on-one counselling. With treatment, Emmanuelle Sharon became very independent and even began helping Nilsson to develop better strategies for treating the survivors of the batarian raids. She still suffered from persistant nightmare and night terrors, but was otherwise considered a fully functioning individual. Seeking new challenges for herself, she enlisted in the Alliance military at age 18. However, against Nilsson's advice, Sharon stopped seeking counselling for her sleeping problems, afraid that it would cause her to be held back. Academy For much of her time at the academy, she adopted a brazen, highly-confident attitude around other recruits, but otherwise tended to keep to herself. She did become extremely close to her roommate, a similarly-introverted medical student named Ofelia Hayes, to the extent that their mutual friends nicknamed them "Manual" and "Feely". At one point, Emmanuelle tried dating a classmate, Roger Emmerich, but he proved to be a particularly poor "beard"; his preference for other male recruits was so obvious that his peers christened him the "Human Torch". During her training, her instructors were impressed with her determination to go beyond the minimum requirements of each mission, though some of them noted that she often focused on details at the expense of the "big picture". SSV Ypres When she graduated from the N7 special forces program, the Alliance brass assigned her to the SSV Ypres. Under the command of Captain Tawfiq Omar, the Ypres had been running a very swift and efficient operation, but the Alliance was concerned about Commander James Skinner, an Earthborn Sentinel with a penchant for breaking rules to get the job done. Skinner had been credited with ensuring the Alliance victory in the Battle of Antarok, but the Alliance brass had been deeply disturbed by the ruthlessness that he'd displayed there, and had transferred him the Ypres, which mostly performed military law enforcement. Sharon was assigned to replace Cmdr. Timothea Young, who'd been placed on maternity leave. Though Sharon and Skinner disliked each other, they proved to be surprisingly effective, particularly during the "Oiwa Incident", in which an unauthorized VI took control of Nakamuraza Station and attempted to shut it down out of rage at being "rejected" by her programmer. Sharon managed to reason with the VI and convince it to let almost all of the station's inhabitants evacuate while Skinner supposedly introduced a virus that purged the VI from the system while leaving the station operational. Thanks to this strategy, the casualties were few, but Sharon's squadmate, engineer Akihiro "Jackie" Mifune, was badly wounded, and would end up paralyzed from the waist down as a result of his injuries. SSV Hegra Though the mission on Nakamuraza was considered successful, Sharon felt guilty about Mifune's injuries, as they had arisen as a result of her orders, and this guilt caused her sleeping problems to get worse. When her CO began to notice, Sharon filed a request for a temporary transfer to the Hegra, hoping to be reunited with her beloved friend Ofelia, who was now the ship's CMO. As it happened, the Hegra had a less-than-stellar reputation, and her CO, Capt. Charlotte Beauclaire, had been seeking a better Executive Officer to help reign in the largely-undisciplined crew. Hoping that the change of scenery would do her some good, Capt. Omar authorized her request. From the start, Sharon's stint aboard the Hegra was troubled. For one thing, Ofelia was no longer there; she'd been transferred to an Alliance hospital. And then there was Capt. Beauclaire. She was not incompetant, but she had dealt with inferior executive officers for so long that she was used to acting without being questioned, and had learned to tolerate her crew's behavior so long as it created "manageable chaos". When Sharon arrived, she sought to whip the crew into shape, and thus she and Beauclaire argued constantly. The Zak'kon Mission Humiliated after being dumped by Capt. Beauclaire, Sharon returned to the Ypres in 2181 CE and began drinking heavily. Eventually, her commanding officer became concerned and told Sharon to accompany Skinner, who was being sent out to rehab for a supposed drug problem. They both decided to skip out of rehab, instead catching a transport for Illium, where Sharon hoped to take advantage of the lack of prohibitions against drugs, while Skinner intended to meet with a dealer of a different sort; unbeknownst to Sharon, Skinner was seeking information in order to find an old adversary who had experimented on him years earlier. One night, while out at a club, Sharon was approached by a young woman, Sylvia, who got her very drunk and took her back to her apartment. The next morning, Sylvia shepherded Sharon to meet her boss, the asari Matriarch Eumenia, who offered her a large sum of credits in exchange for a very special job. The Matriach's daughter, Siani, was a commando with the Livis company. The Livis had been sent to the batarian colony world Zak'kon to defuse a rapidly worsening skirmish between the Esan Liberation Army and the Batarian Hegemony, and had instead become pinned down, and thus Eumenidia wished to hire Sharon to extract her daughter. Sharon refused and walked away. Meanwhile, however, Skinner's information broker had informed him that Fletcher was hiding out on Zak'kon. When he discovered about Sharon's job offer, he convinced her that she had a duty to rescue innocents, and so a few days later, they ended up accompanying a small army of asari mercenaries to Zak'kon. Based on the information they had received prior to departure, Sharon believed that she and Skinner would easily rescue Siani. Upon arriving, however, they discovered that the batarians' numbers were nearly three times the number that they had been given. Furthermore, Siani was not at the camp; Sharon was informed that she'd been sent on ahead to the lost city of Nairida. Eumenidia had tricked them, intending for them to be captured or killed in the hopes that their deaths would draw the Alliance fleet into the conflict, thus sparking a war that might force the batarians to give up the territory that they had captured from the asari centuries earlier. SSV Belgrade Now under the uncomfortable scrutiny of her former lover's vengeful ex-husband, Sharon struggled to make do, unwilling to grant Adm. Gargosh the satisfaction of surrender. She spent three years hunting down deserters and traitors, but discovered that many of those she had captured were getting the same "offer" that Gargosh gave her. She also hated being away from Siani for long periods of time. Nonetheless, for most of her time in Gargosh's division, she was a model officer, and greatly respected by her crew. But things eventually fell apart when Gargosh deployed Sharon to track down Maj. Maria Wilders. Once a highly-decorated officer, Wilders had gone rogue, and was at the time tearing through Omega on a campaign to bring "justice" to the notoriously-corrupt station.﻿ Private Sector After her brutal treatment at the hands of the Mad Major, and Gargosh's subsequent ouster from the Alliance brass, Sharon was granted the possibility of an early discharge, and at Siani's urging, she left the Systems Alliance Navy to serve as the captain of NairidaCorp's flagship, the NCSV Arine. Several of Sharon's crew, most notably Paul Barnes and Bethany Truman, followed her, causing some scandal in the Illium media, which suggested that the Systems Alliance was trying to install "plants" in an ostensibly private, asari-owned company, but this faded as more asari joined the crew. The first year of NairidaCorp's efforts at "third-party conflict resolution" were turbulent. Jointly hired by Palias Security and Archon Detainment Systems to help curb inter-species violence at L'Shero Correctional Station, the Arine was forced to intervene in the lirrax invasion of the nearby asari world Tamaris after a human inmate, Justine Marsters, snuck onto the ship and stole a drop shuttle, which she then accidentally crashed into Tamaris. Political Hell In 2185 CE, Sharon had grown frustrated with the Alliance regulations that prevented Siani from staying with her on the Belgrade, and thus sought to marry her in order to make her an Alliance citizen. Under the Marcel-Holland Act, an Alliance citizen could petition for his or her asari mate to be given full citizenship, provided that they had been together for ten years and had held a marriage ceremony according to the customs of a human religion. However, Sharon and Dantius soon found themselves in the crosshairs of Bart Gallows, a political pundit who was running for a seat in the Alliance Parliament on a platform of repealing the Marcel-Holland Act. Much to Sharon and Dantius' consternation, Gallows had help from an established and somewhat respected news reporter, Khalisah al-Jilani, who had been a friend of Siani's mother. Appears in *''Mass Effect: Deception'' *''Mass Effect: Disgraced'' *''Mass Effect: Deadlier Than the Male'' *''Mass Effect: Infiltration'' Behind the scenes *Sharon's original portrait was modelled after actress Cote de Pablo (from the TV series NCIS).﻿ From the creator: "Emmanuelle Sharon was not the first Shepard that I created, but she's the one that I actually have affection for. After several playthroughs of both ME1 and ME2 with her, I have trouble envisioning anyone else as the Hero of the Citadel. Hell, I even kind of cried a little (just a little) when she was reunited with Liara at the end of 'Lair of the Shadow Broker'. "Creating a Paragon-type character is easy enough - the pure Paragon will always do what is morally right. But you have to add some flaws unless you want to create a Dudley Do-Right with a stick up his ass. Sharon's flaw is a fear of sleep, the result of unadressed psychological issues stemming from that long-ago raid on her home. Of course, no widely-revered hero wants to admit to having night terrors, so she's developed strategies for hiding her problems that are a bit self-destructive." Category:Female Category:Humans Category:Soldier